“You’re fucked in the head,” I tell him, and then cough as the leather digs into my skin.
He hums at me. “You use pretty words as sharp knives, and I think you’ve become attached to seeing me scarred. Do they make your pussy wet, baby?”
I raise my chin, deciding to take a different route and go with the truth for once.
“Yes,” I admit, as firmly as I can manage.
He stares at me, his mismatched pools as intense as the cold wind ravaging my body. The pale scar cutting through his white eye stands out proudly amongst the otherwise smooth flesh.
It hurts to look at him.
His gaze thins, and he approaches me until I can feel the blissful heat radiating from his body.
“I didn’t mean what I said,” I whisper before he can say whatever words are resting on his tongue. “I’m sorry.”
He pauses, and my discomfort grows as his gaze intensifies.
“I’ve given you nothing but honesty, and you continue to give me lies. Is this another attempt to bring me back in just to kick me out again?”
I swallow, my throat drier than the bark digging into my back.
“No,” I rasp, and my lip trembles from the shame burning the backs of my eyes. “You’re right. I… There’s no excuse for what I said. I don’t want you to leave. And I do love you.”
“So you’ve said,” he murmurs. He cocks his head and muses aloud, “Yet you tried to take it back. You gave me something precious and then tried to rip it away.”
I shake my head, desperation clogging my throat.
“I won’t do that ever again,” I swear, another tear burning a trail down my cold cheek. It snags his attention, and I watch his eyes zero in on it, tracking it until it drips from my chin.
When he looks at me once more, it hits me that this isn’t just a punishment. This will be a test to prove my love. To prove that I mean it when I say it.
“You cut me because you know I’ll gladly bleed for you. So now I want to see you bleed for me.”
I open my mouth, prepared to tell him that I already have, but before I can, he bends and grabs a long, gnarled twig off the ground, fisting it in his hand. Whatever I was going to say somersaults right back down my throat, and my heart stalls in my chest.
“What are you going to do?” I ask hesitantly, eyeing the branch like he’s holding a gun.
Scratch that, give me the gun. I’ve survived that before.
He responds to my question by rearing his arm back and slapping me across the thigh with it. For a blissful second, I’m too shocked to feel anything, but then the sharp, piercing pain comes racing in, and all I can do is let out a strangled scream. I look down at my thigh in disbelief, an angry red welt already protruding from my skin.
My chest heaves, watching a line of blood bead from the wound before trailing down my thigh.
I look up at him, mouth parted, eyes wide, and utter bewilderment on my face.
“You fucking whipped me,” I gasp, incapable of saying anything other than the obvious.
He crouches down, looking closely at the tiny trickles of blood staining my thigh. Lifting his hand, his fingers feather across the wound, and I hiss in response.
He looks up at me through thick, black lashes, and if I weren’t strapped to a tree, I’d collapse from the raw intensity on his face. “Are you not willing to bleed for me?”
I bite my trembling lip. I cut him deep, an invisible wound that will scar him as permanently as the marks on his body. Some days, when I’m lost in my own head, I forget how intensely Zade loves.
“Giving my heart to you was something I prayed I’d never do,” I whisper. “But you’ve always been a God, and I didn’t realize my pleas were going straight into your hands. Yet they always went unanswered.”
Seeing him now, kneeling before me, I understand why. The day I handed over my love to him was the first time a God fell to his knees, bowed his head, and prayed. He prayed because I gave him the one thing he could never control, and he never wanted to lose it.
My vision blurs, and I struggle to keep the tears at bay. “I’ll bleed for you, Zade. I’ll always bleed for you.”